Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Son's Girlfriend

By William M. Hoffman

Published: October 28, 2001

THE SAME SEA

By Amos Oz.

Translated by Nicholas de Lange

in collaboration with the author.

201 pp. New York:

Harcourt. $24.

How many readers, I wonder, will find it as tricky a business as I did to make their way into ''The Same Sea,'' Amos Oz's new novel? The plot is not contorted, and neither are the novelist's ideas. There is nothing hidden about the personalities or emotions of the characters.

The characters do speak for themselves, to be sure -- without introduction. There are many voices, and each of them naturally has a personal story and a personal style of telling it. But all of them seem to want to talk at the same time. The experience is like being the guest at a dinner party of a wildly dysfunctional family that is not shy about airing its secrets. Now, this shouldn't rattle someone who writes for the theater, but when the talk is mostly in verse it is not always easy to follow what the novel is about.

I tried reading sections at random. That did not help. Although I suspected that this was not simply another postmodern exercise, nevertheless I found myself picking up the book, getting infuriated and slamming it down. Then, one day, just as I was about to give up, everything came into focus. The book unfolded itself in one sitting, making me laugh and weep and sometimes shiver with delight at its surprising beauty.

The story is not very complicated. Albert, a middle-aged recent widower in Tel Aviv, falls in love with Dita, the girlfriend of his son, Rico, who is off finding himself in -- where else? -- the Himalayas. But Albert is also involved with Bettine, a woman his own age, while Dita is having casual sex with Giggy, a close friend of Rico's, and flirting with the zhlub Dubi, who, not so incidentally, has promised to produce her movie script. Meanwhile, Rico finds himself in the arms of Maria, a motherly Portuguese prostitute in Katmandu, but ends up infatuated with a pubescent street boy in Sri Lanka. Death, adultery, casual sex, homosexuality: definitely not atypical themes in the nought decade of the 21st century.

Democracy is the presiding spirit of this novel, so the dead are not disenfranchised from casting their votes as to how the story is to be told. Albert's deceased wife, Nadia, is not only part of Albert's background story but also, after a lingering death from cancer, a ghost with a role among the living. Post-mortem, she provides intermittent commentary on the fate of the family she left behind, going so far as to follow her son into bed with the whore. Death does not quell her need for love and attention: ''Kiss the feet my son / of the woman Maria / whose womb, for an instant, / returned you to mine.''

Compared with some of the living, she is a character of real stability. Dubi's is a tawdry little universe. He is so enamored of the character Dita has created in her screenplay that he wants to sleep with its author, confusing the two utterly. Dita is disgusted by him. For a time a reader may anticipate that she will turn out to be an Israeli Molly Bloom, because we enter her sensual stream of consciousness, but in the last analysis Dita is driven by ambition more than lust.

There are no mysteries in the motivations of any of the characters, except in those of the author, who appears as a friend both of Albert, who is his accountant, and of Bettine. Oz seems as puzzled by his appearance in the novel as I was: ''The fictional Narrator puts the cap back on his pen and pushes away the writing pad. He is tired. And his back aches. He asks himself how on earth he came to write such a story.'' He hovers at the fringes of the story, even revealing the autobiographical sources for his characters. ''Nadia Danon, for instance: like my teacher Zelda / she too died of cancer.'' Even more outrageously, his characters telephone him and criticize the way he portrays them in the novel.

His transparent playfulness raises questions: Is he using the novel to perform a dance of multiple veils for us, playing on the readers' desire to see a naked author sitting in the heart of his story? How far will he go? Is he flirting with us, shamelessly testing our gullibility? What else can he be doing when he joins the story's climax during the negotiation for the sale of Dita's screenplay, whose literary merit he is asked to evaluate? (Truth is that I accepted the novelist's sly appearance hook, line and sinker.)

If this sounds like what critics call metafiction, don't be put off by the label. In his memoir, ''Original Story By,'' the playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents says, ''Everything changes but the avant-garde,'' and he is right. Most postmodern fiction sends me running to highly plotted mystery stories with recurring predictable characters. I have little interest in the questions that are raised in metafiction because they are usually linked to abstract philosophy. I want plot and character in my novels -- and if a little bit of philosophy happens to rise out of that fertile soil like a flower, fine. But since the characters of ''The Same Sea'' are so well drawn -- from the inside out, it felt -- I found it perfectly acceptable that Oz was blatantly toying with my philosophy glands.

William M. Hoffman, author of the play ''As Is'' and the libretto of ''The Ghosts of Versailles,'' is working on the librettos of ''The Cows of Apollo'' for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and ''Morning Star'' for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.